A name that is known for many things, with differing emphases to many people, and not just automotive history junkies. Among auto enthusiasts, particularly in North America, the name John DeLorean is associated with the Pontiac Firebird, GTO or Tempest, or maybe the Chevrolet Vega. In the case of the general public, especially in the UK, the name is much more likely to invoke his eponymous sports car, the drug allegations for which he was acquitted, or the fact he got £100m out of the British government.
The DeLorean has been in CC before and, of course, most of the story is pretty well known, with its maker’s rise from a humble background as a Chrysler, then Packard, engineer and then to Chief Engineer at Pontiac, and later, GM Division Vice President for Pontiac and eventually, Chevrolet. His last GM post was as Vice President of Car and Truck production before he resigned in 1973, aged 48. For several years, he had cultivated the image of the non-conformist in GM, dressing casually, being outspoken and even inviting Lee Iacocca to serve as best man at his second wedding.
DeLorean parted company with GM in 1973 and started his own business (the DeLorean Motor Corporation) to design and build a stainless steel bodied sports car. The original spin was that this was to be an ethical and environmentally conscious product, conceived with a Wankel rotary engine and an innovative chassis manufactured using a patented process known as elastic reservoir moulding (ERM), aiming for a lightweight construction. After a lot of technical to and fro, both the Wankel engine and the ERM were dropped for a Peugeot-Renault-Volvo V6 and a backbone chassis similar to that used in the Lotus Esprit. Whether the chassis or the development programme with Lotus came first is unclear. With a similar production process, architecture and suspension geometry, one could be forgiven for considering the resulting car as something of a re-engined Lotus Esprit with more recent Guigiaro styling, stainless steel exterior and gullwing doors aside.
After trawling the world for a production site and investors, DeLorean ended up accepting grant assistance of almost £100M from the British government in 1978 to help fund the manufacturing, in return for 2000 jobs in Dunmurry, near Belfast, at a time when such jobs were few and far between, and the provision of jobs was seen as a factor in reducing the then on-going civil unrest. Production started in January 181 and ended in December 1982, despite the company going into administration in February 1982. In October 1982, DeLorean was charged with drug trafficking, but acquitted in 1984. The car never resumed production and DeLorean slipped into a lower profile retirement. He died in 2005.
The car was not a commercial success, obviously. In many ways, it was not a technical success either, from lacklustre performance from the 130bhp engine, strangled by emissions control systems, to the lack of opportunity to personalise the car, as the stainless finish was always the same. A Delorean stood out, but not from another DeLorean.
The distinctive car lives on, with some film roles adding to its profile and although never sold officially in Europe, it is still seen occasionally at car shows. At April’s Drive It Day event at Brooklands, there were three of them, lined up together with another government-funded project, Concorde.
Concorde needs no introduction; the world’s first and only successful supersonic passenger transport, it was built within a partnership of British and French aerospace industries, including British Aircraft Corporation (now part of BAE Systems but which has disposed its civil aviation interests to EADS), Sud-Aviation of France (now part of EADS-Airbus), and Rolls-Royce and Snecma for the engines.
Of course, it absorbed a lot of Government money, from both partners, and got very close to being cancelled more than once. Indeed, the fact it was a partnership between governments probably meant it survived. Like the DeLorean, it was not commercially successful (at least for the manufacturers, the operators made something of it eventually) and large elements of the technology have not been repeated. As a piece of engineering and as a piece of functional sculpture, however, it is probably unbeaten.
Even by three DeLoreans!
Awesome postcard of a future that wasn’t
My parents always joke about how they grew up with The Jetsons and how lackluster the future ended up in comparison. I consider Concorde my generation’s real life Jetsons. We grew up in a time where 50/60s fantasy was as close to reality as ever, and then witnessed it get taken away from us. Air travel now of course is the most stressfull, intrusive, miserable, slow, unreliable, germ ridden way to travel imaginable. Talk about dashed expectations.
Cue the inevitable flying complaints…..Jeez….is it flying or are you sure you weren’t in a Russian Gulag?
And then what happened after all the disease and intrusion?
Did you fly across the sky like a bird at 600mph and arrive safely at your destination?
Or why do people expect $99 ticket on Southworsjetblew have to equal the same experience as a first class on a Edwardian era steamship.
Wouldn’t the Concorde have been a stressfull, intrusive, miserable,
slow,expensive, unreliable, germ ridden way to travel?My parents flew it once. It was crowded; the seat pitch was none too generous. But otherwise, it was splendid: superb service, food, etc. And most of all, it made the transatlantic trip very short.
I’ve never flown on one, but I’ve been inside one a few times, they are pretty small inside, like a single isle smaller commercial jet. The windows are really small too. The service on Concorde was considered First Class “Plus”, all of the seats were the same too, there was no coach/tourist class. The seats are slim leather seats, not like huge leather and fur lined thrones from a contemporary 747 for example, but still nice seats.
I’d wager it cost them a bit more than a $99 ticket on Southworstjetblew. That was one of the two biggest issues with the SST; the price to fly it was astronomical. Yeah, it crossed the Atlantic quickly, but it was cramped and expensive.
At least you got to drink Dom Perignon champagne for the price of your over $10k round-trip ticket.
Concorde took years to get into service, it first flew in 1969, but revenue flights didn’t begin until 1976, by then the world had changed on Concorde. Concorde had 100 order options at one time everyone from Pan Am to Sabena wanted one.
Rising fuel cost plus protests from environmentalist flat earth wet blankets twisting their panties about sonic booms and other factors put a damper on Concordes luster.
…must have been an amazing experience for them ..imagine flying at Mach 2.1 ..who does that this century?? ..and who is ever likely too again?? ..one supposes travel well into the future will be via space-time technology rather than physical A to B transportation means..
…who would have thought 50 years ago that ‘mail’ could be sent to the other side of the word at the click of a button.. that would have been thought insane, that one had to use the Post Office and have a ‘postie on a bicycle’ deliver the mail to you in another country and that 4 weeks would have been ‘fast’..
..it doesn’t take too much imagination to realize that there will come a time when the Concorde will be just laughed at as such ancient ‘slow-slow-slow’ technology, and who would ever have wanted to have travelled transatlantically by such an archaic means ..when the push of a button will do the job instantaneously
what do you think CERN was looking into..
My parents didn’t pay; it was very expensive, and my dad was notoriously cheap. They were vacationing in Europe, and a rich Saudi prince was going to have some brain surgery at Johns Hopkins and wanted my father, the head of the Hopkins EEG Lab, to do the EEG just before the surgery, and paid to him him get back extra fast.
It was highly memorable, they said.
Actually the Soviet Tu-144 was the first supersonic passenger jet. Its first flight was before the Concorde, though its first passenger trip was after the Concorde.
P.S. Oops…I must have skimmed over “successful”. The Tu-144 was the first to fly but it was not successful, having gone on only 55 or so commercial flights.
Google for “Car & Technology Museum Sinsheim”. There you can admire theTU-144 right next to the Air France Concorde that made the last flight of this species.
Another great read Roger,thank you.I saw a De Lorean dealer(Wildings I think) behind the Imperial hotel in Blackpool around 1982.The DeLorean stood out as it was in one of Blackpool’s many war zones and Idon’t think any were sold.Back then a Capri with a jacked up rear and a Whitesnake album cover sprayed on the bonnet(hood) was the car to have in Blackpool
The De Lorean isn’t merely a re-bodied Esprit. The chassis is similar but the engine position is much more rearward on the De Lorean so. The front suspension was also woefully unspec’ed as well. Purely as a functional car it is a bit crap but they look fantastic.
Thank you for setting us straight; I knew someone would have an extensive understanding.
Chapman was brought into the project to make it work Deloreans design was rubbish and couldnt be built. The Esprit is a DMC done properly.
“Purely as a functional car it is a bit crap but they look fantastic”
Quite right David.
I hadn’t realised the engine was further back though compared with the Esprit
And DMC lives on today – if you ever get a chance to visit one of their franchise locations, do it. A former Boeing engineer runs the one near me in Bellevue, WA. It’s like going back . . . to the future!
… the lack of opportunity to personalise the car, as the stainless finish was always the same. A Delorean stood out, but not from another DeLorean.
I’ve seen one in LA that was painted red. I don’t know if it’s because we’re only familiar with the silvery ones (due to what the headshrink industry calls “the latency effect”: the earliest version of something seems to us the “correct” one), but it didn’t look good to me in traditional Sportscar Red. Maybe other colors would work (black?), but it was surprisingly unimpressive in a color it would certainly been offered in had JZDL not taken the bold but peculiar decision to make his bodies out of recycled soup spoons.
The biggest disappointment with the DMC, though, was always the scanty 130hp motors. Why, that’s scarcely enough ponies to get the damn thing up to 88.8 mph!
There were a couple of gold plated versions made for a bank. but you are right, there were no real differences between them.
I recall reading that the stainless steel finish came in for criticism in the real world because the cars were always covered by finger and hand prints. I recall reading about an owner who said that everyone who came up to ogle the car had to feel the stainless steel, and left handprints that needed to be buffed out.
I also recall reading that about midway through production (or a little later) the factory offered the cars with painted finishes in addition to the stainless.
Have seen one here that’s been painted yellow; also not a great look. It seemed to make most of the detail design invisible.
Hot Wheels has had a DeLorean in its lineup of die-cast toy vehicles for the past few years. My son has two, neither of which is stainless steel-colored (or even silver). One has kind of a stainless look but is gold rather than silver, perhaps based on the one in the picture that Leon posted, while the other is painted red.
You mean like this one? I got this from my brother a few years ago. Owing to the fuel door latch on its hood it is early 1981 as later 1981 models and beyond lost the flap.
Excellent treatment, Roger. I had never thought about the Concorde and the DeLorean as being somehow related, but they truly were, in just the way you stated.
I have always wondered about how the car would have fared with a more robust powerplant. These things were expensive and looked like they should have been fast, but fast they were not. A Ford or Chevy smallblock might not have been very sexy in that price bracket, but the cars sure would have moved.
I remember all of the hoopla over the “SST”. One of my best friends built a model kit of the Concorde. IIRC, it came with two separate front end pieces, one the normal one in flight, and the second in the drooped-down attitude for landing. This, I was convinced in 1970 or so, was truly the future.
JP, I always thought the same thing about the anemic powerplant in these things. All the more puzzling given John Z’s background with the GTO. In a way this was the anti-GTO. A highly styled sports car with slug engine where the Goat was an everyday Tempest stuffed with a powerful V-8.
DeLorean was a man in tune with the times, and they had changed a lot by the 70s. He envisioned a car that embodied the qualities that were increasingly being prioritized: efficiency, safety, durable. But he also didn’t have much choice when it came to engines; what else would have fit in the rear of a small car like that? Porsche wasn’t about to sell him engines. He bought what was available, for better or for worse. And with the emission regs of the times, it wasn’t really feasible to modify the PRV V6.
Both the cars and the jet still look futuristic today. I remember going to the LA car shows when the DeLorean first came out, it was polished out to look like the body was all chrome. There were ropes around the display, but I still saw a few fingerprints on it. In 1969, when Apollo 11 was on TV, I thought for sure in only a few years we would walk on Mars and beyond. 45 years later still waiting. Great write up.
I remember reading about DeLorean taking a lot of flights between the states & the UK on the Concorde, even when he needed cash for his company that was in trouble.
How about that BAC1-11 in the background of the second picture? I worked on those flying machines for ten years in the ’80s. The airline I work for had a fleet of about 30 of those.
Concorde and DMC. Styling, Roger.
Ain’t that about 3/4 of the total DeLorean production in the picture. 🙂
I’m sorry but to this day I cannot understand how anybody, let alone someone with DeLorean’s experience and qualifications could have thought about such an ill-conceived vehicle, indeed, concept. By the mid-70s the rear-engined sportscar was a dying breed. Porsche (and to a lesser extant, Alpine Renault) was the exception which proved the rule. The DeLorean was to be sold to people who in general did not understand about driving cars and who would have gotten into trouble in a rear-engined vehicle as soon as road conditions presented the “right” opportunity. On the other hand, it did not appeal to the typical Porsche 911 buyer. It was obvious it was going to fail from the start – it was the sort of thing an Israeli businessman with absolutely no understanding of motor cars would be duped into doing (Google “Sabra”) but John Z? Was it the drugs he (allegedly) used or something else?